In addition to providing bandwidth, modern network service providers may offer services to enterprise customers including enterprise networking, virtual private networking, virtual network functions and Internet and cloud services connectivity. A network service provider must therefore “service chain” together several functions that a customer needs in the path of their network connectivity between their enterprise sites and network-based cloud service providers. To do that, the network service provider must define and consistently implement the characteristics of the network segments that make up that end-to-end connectivity. Presently disclosed is a series of interconnection routing configuration templates that may be used to consistently deploy the right network connectivity needed as part of an overall service context.
To implement connectivity in accordance with the specifications of enterprise customers and cloud service providers, network service providers must frequently string together multiple network functions, such as a network address translator, a firewall, a WAN Accelerator, a rate limiter/traffic shaper, etc., in various combinations across a series of network segments. The complexity of the network configurations can become untenable. Until now, the number of functions has been relatively small and network service providers have approached this problem via a brute force approach, using hand-crafted individual configurations for network segments. With the advent of numerous virtualized functions that can be inserted in arbitrary combinations, that approach is no longer viable.